Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Colwick

Driveway & Patio Cleaning for Colwick homes

Front gardens turned into hardstanding on ground with no fall and a high water table, so a good many were laid permeable. Permeable joints are filled with angular grit, not kiln dried sand, and washing one the usual way seals it.

The ground here is flat and it holds water, and that has shaped what got laid on top of it. Front gardens on the semis were opened up for a second car, and once more than a few square metres of garden goes under a hard surface the water has to be dealt with on the plot rather than run out onto the road. With the water table this close to the surface a soakaway is often not the answer, so a fair number of these hardstandings went down as permeable block instead. That changes the clean completely. Permeable paving works because the joints stay open, they are filled with angular grit rather than kiln dried sand, and a wash that finishes with fine sand brushed into them quietly turns a drainage surface back into a solid one.

Colwick sits in NG4, under Gedling Borough Council. Commercial work leads, because the estate holds warehouses, trade counters and small mezzanine offices that need a contracted round rather than an occasional visit. Household cleaning in the village runs alongside it, mostly fortnightly. After builders work is steady too, from unit refits and shopfits as tenants change over.

What we run into on Colwick driveway & patio cleaning jobs

Fall is the other thing missing, and you notice it during the wash rather than afterwards. On a sloping drive the slurry runs to a low point and is collected there. On these plots there is barely any fall at all, so grey water and dead algae spread and sit, and left to itself it heads for the back door threshold or over the boundary into next door's border. So the vacuum works alongside the surface cleaner rather than following it round at the end. The bungalow drives are the other pattern: two concrete ribbons to a garage with a strip down the middle that is now moss, and the worst of the black film sits either side of it.

How a Colwick driveway & patio cleaning job actually runs

Three things have to be on site and all of them are worth checking before the day. An outside tap, or a route for a hose from the kitchen, because the machine draws continuously and a bucket is not an option. Power, or a machine that does not need it. And the cars off, which on the streets without drives means somebody finding a space elsewhere for most of a day, so midweek is easier to book than a Saturday. Timing follows the weather here more than the calendar does. Block paving cannot be re-sanded onto a wet surface, and on flat ground that holds water the way this does, drying takes longer than it does up the hill toward Carlton, so a wash in a damp week means the sand goes in on a second visit. We would rather say that at the quote than turn up and improvise on the day. Spring is the sensible slot: the winter growth is at its worst and there are usually enough dry days behind it to finish the job properly rather than leaving it half done.

Who books it here

The housing here is mostly two and three bedroom semis and short terraces along Vale Road and Mile End Road, bungalows on the cul-de-sacs off them, and a little newer infill nearer the loop road, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

We run Colwick on the same round as Netherfield, Sneinton and Carlton.

What we check on every Colwick job

Look at the height of the path against the wall before any water goes on. On plots resurfaced two or three times over the decades, each new layer went on top of the last, and the finished level has crept up the brickwork until the air bricks are half buried and the damp proof course sits at or below the paving. You can often find the original course two bricks lower than the point the path meets. That matters during a wash for a simple reason: water put down at that height has nowhere to drain except into the wall, and a machine puts a great deal of water down quickly. So the pressure comes off against the house, the run is worked away from the brickwork rather than toward it, and air bricks get covered before anything starts. It is worth knowing for its own sake too, because a bridged damp proof course explains damp inside that no amount of cleaning will ever touch.

What the driveway & patio cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• Before the water goes on: Imprinted concrete flagged as a sealer job rather than a jetting job, because what has failed there is the sealer coat, not the concrete under it
• Before the water goes on: Cars, bins and furniture moved off, planting and painted timber sheeted
• The clean: Rotary surface cleaner across the open area, which is what keeps every pass even
• The clean: Black spot lichen treated with a proprietary remover and dwell time, because pressure alone does not lift it and pressure hard enough to try will damage the slab

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full driveway & patio cleaning page sets out every section of the scope, what is deliberately excluded and why, how long it takes on each property size, and what tends to go wrong.